In my “spare time” I coded up something that I thought would be of interest for all the TechConsumer readers out there; we are calling it TechConsumer Price Drops (see widget in the sidebar). Basically, our server continually tracks the change in prices at Amazon.com to find the products that have had a significant price drop recently, like a PC-free cordless Skype phone (25% price drop), a Garmin GPS unit (15% price drop), or a Pioneer 1080p upscaling DVD player (13% price drop).
It’s always nice to find products that are marked down off the list price, but most products online are already discounted. How do you know if it is an especially good deal? The idea is for this price drop listing to inform you of products that were recently selling online for a significantly higher price. The top price drops are in the sidebar on the right. Also, you can view the full list by clicking on this link or the “More Price Drops” link at the bottom of the sidebar widget.
For now I’ve limited the price drop listing to certain categories that seem most relevant to readers of TechConsumer (i.e., consumer electronics and computers). But that could change if I hear of any interest for this kind of service for other types of products. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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As I’ve mentioned before, Amazon is where I do most of my online shopping anyway. So it’s nice to have this kind of information available.
That’s why I did it with Amazon first. They sell almost anything, usually for a very good price.
I saw this when I checked the site this morning and was wondering if there was gonna be a ‘press release’. Very cool feature!
Very cool. Nice work.
Here is another site I usually use. It works very well.
http://www.nukeprice.com
This is very cool. I think you should include images in the widget
Glad you like it Yan. I’ll have to see how I could possibly incorporate images into the widget. If you click “More Price Drops…” it does show the whole list (not just the top 7) with images.
Is your app able to get price drops on items where amazon list price is not displayed and you have to “Click here to see price”? Thank you.
Amod,
I’m pretty sure it does. It pulls the prices down via RSS, and I believe (~98% sure) those prices are included. IIRC, they use some HTML/CSS/Javascript to obscure the price so you have to click on something. However if you are parsing the code, it doesn’t care that some piece of content shouldn’t be shown, because the price is still visible in the HTML.
Check the Best Amazon Price Watch Site:
http://www.nukeprice.com
Are you keeping track of all the price drop(s) using amazon web services? I would be interested in knowing more about the actual code and architecture you are using considering amazon has millions of items listed. Thank you for great work.
I actually only track the top 100 bestsellers in a variety of categories. My implementation is all PHP/MySQL and uses their RSS feeds. I have though about switching over to AWS though. It wouldn’t be hard, but I’d just have to find the time, and it works fine right now.
I have our server pull down data on a couple of thousand best selling products multiple times each day and put it in a database. Then the database is analyzed to find any products whose price has dropped over the last two weeks to a month. I create a new table with that data and sort by smallest to largest (largest discount to smallest).
For the widget on the homepage I exclude cellphones from being shown because their pricing structure (tons of phones are deeply discounted from their “retail” price) made them dominate the list.
It may be too much to ask but would you mind to share the source code and db structure?
@Yan
I have a different version of the price drop widget on my personal blog that has images.
@Raj
Second, I’m not an amazing programmer and frankly I don’t want to have others see my amateurish code.
Sorry, but I’m not really comfortable with disclosing that for two reasons. First, it is my baby, and I want it all to myself.
Here’s yet another Amazon price tracker :
http://www.zoolert.com/amazon-price-tracker/
The catch with this one is that it gets your alerts via email, rss or the custom page that it creates on the fly.
It also checks when it hits the price you want and when its in stock. Direct from amazon.com or 3rd party.
It’s also got price history charts so you can trend prices like stocks.
My favourite price tracker is http://PriceNeedle.com, you’ll get notifed by email or SMS and you can set up price trackers for several products at once.
I recommend http://www.pricedropfinder.com – it not only tracks prices like the other sites but also gives you price history charts for anything on amazon. the daily deal section where they go through some proprietary algorithm to pick out the all-time-low-price are usually nice deals that beat anywhere else online. i even buy them to resell on ebay/amazon